In many cases, the end of the year gives you time to step back and take stock of the last 12 months. This is when many of us take a hard look at what worked and what did not, complete performance reviews, and formulate plans for the coming year. For me, it is all of those things plus a time when I u...

If I had to give this book a one word description, I would say it is 'balanced'. In the beginning of the book the author mentions that he does not want to right one of those books that list a little code and then explains the code, changes the code, explains those changes and so on and so on.

At first he scared me. I have read some insanely wordy programming and engineering books. I have a much harder time getting through those than the type the author described. I was afraid this book would be one of those that I don't get anything out of except war stories from the author's career. That would not be all bad if the stories had anything to do with the book. I am happy to report that is not what happened.

I found the author had just the right amount of discussion around the different language features he was covering. I thought that the offer had a very no nonsense approach to all the topic that he covered.

The book is broken down into four parts. Below I have listed the three different parts, and the chapters that they contain.

Part I: Introduction to Objective-CChapter 1. C, the Foundation of Objective-CChapter 2. More about C VariablesChapter 3. An Introduction to Object-Oriented ProgrammingChapter 4. Your First Objective-C Program

One thing I really liked about the book was that the author did not use ARC throughout the book. He decided that reference counting is a very important topic to understand. The logic is that you're going to have to work with legacy code that is not going to be using ARC. There's much more legacy code out there then there is new code. He does take the time to explain how ARC works later in the book and the advanced concepts part.

I thought that I would lightly skim the first few chapters that cover the foundation of Objective-C. But as I was skimming, I found the author's writing style very nice to read, and therefore I ended up reading it word for word.

I must admit that I have been using messaging for a while now, but I never really understood messaging within the Objective-C context until I read this author's explanation of it. The author also has excellent coverage of properties and all of the different ways they can be declared.

The chapter on blocks was also very well put together. The author starts out by explaining function pointers and the issues that you can run into using them. He then does a very thorough job of covering blocks.

Every chapter in the book is a gem and overall I found this author's writing style made the book very easy to read. This book will stay by my side. It's not only a good cover to cover read, it is also a very good reference.

I would recommend this book as the place to start for anyone coming from a different find which such as C# or Java, and also as the place to start for anybody looking to get into building applications with Objective-C.

SYS-CON Events announced today that MangoApps will exhibit at SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY., and the 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Sant...

SYS-CON Events announced today that Solgenia will exhibit at SYS-CON's 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, and the 17th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 3–5, 2015, at the Santa ...

The world's leading Cloud event, Cloud Expo has launched Microservices Journal on the SYS-CON.com portal, featuring over 19,000 original articles, news stories, features, and blog entries.
DevOps Journal is focused on this critical enterprise IT topic in the world of cloud computing.
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Hosted PaaS providers have given independent developers and startups huge advantages in efficiency and reduced time-to-market over their more process-bound counterparts in enterprises. Software frameworks are now available that allow enterprise IT departments to provide these same adva...

Even though it’s now Microservices Journal, long-time fans of SOA World Magazine can take comfort in the fact that the URL – soa.sys-con.com – remains unchanged. And that’s no mistake, as microservices are really nothing more than a new and improved take on the Service-Oriented Archite...

SYS-CON Events announced today the IoT Bootcamp – Jumpstart Your IoT Strategy, being held June 9–10, 2015, in conjunction with 16th Cloud Expo and Internet of @ThingsExpo at the Javits Center in New York City. This is your chance to jumpstart your IoT strategy.
Combined with real-worl...